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Nerval's Lobster writes "Former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates displayed a bit of emotion when talking to CBS's 60 Minutes about Steve Jobs. The interview didn't focus entirely on the relationship between the two men, with most of its running time devoted instead to Gates's charitable efforts. But when the conversation shifted to their last meeting before Jobs's death from cancer in 2011, Gates—normally so cerebral—seemed a bit sad. 'When he was sick I got to go down and spend time with him,' Gates said, describing their meeting as 'forward looking.' Jobs spent a portion of their time together showing off designs for his yacht, which he would never see completed—something that Gates defended when the interviewer seemed a little bit incredulous. 'Thinking about your potential mortality isn't very constructive,' he said. Gates also praised Steve Jobs's marketing and design skills: 'He understood, he had an intuitive sense for marketing that was amazing.' In contrast to his subtle—and not so subtle—digs at the iPad over the years, Gates conceded that Apple had 'put the pieces together in a way that succeeded' with regard to tablets. Gates's magnanimity toward his former rival and Apple is a reflection, perhaps, of his current position in life: it's been nearly five years since his last full-time day at Microsoft, and all of his efforts seem focused on his philanthropic endeavors. He simply has no reason to rip a rival limb from limb in the same way he did as Microsoft CEO."

Students have had notebooks en masse for 10-15 years now, and THOSE didn't really revolutionize the classroom.

This is what always bothers me about the tech in classroom push, I graduated college only two years ago and while it makes me feel like a Luddite to say it, I think the combination of a video projector connected to the professor's laptop, a whiteboard, and a student with pen and paper doesn't really have a whole lot of room for improvement outside of specialized cases. My sister in law is an elementary teacher, so I know kids are one of the cases where tech can be put to really good use, but this article is talking about college and so will I.

Software is about automation, and for the most part we've already solved most of the pain points that detract from the ability to have a productive lecture. I think thats why most of the real improvements have been made in online classes, and the online components of traditional classes. By making all course materials instantly accessible anywhere the only things that lectures have over online classes anymore is the immediacy of interaction with the professor, and the act of note-taking. What else actually matters in a lecture and what tech could actually help that in the lecture hall? Maybe something like google moderator for huge class sizes would be useful? I'd say that being able to recall anything that happened in the lectures would be great, but even when I had access to recordings of a multi-campus class I took over a teleconferencing service I never used them.

And the note taking device doesn't really make a whole lot of difference, software can't (yet) automate the act of putting information into your brain. I did some classes with pen and paper, I did some by typing on a laptop, and a classmate used a laptop-that-rotates-into-touchscreen-and-stylus job; it's all just a matter of preference really.

That sounds like a particularly nasty mess right there, as most of the attacks originate from foreign soil.

This is terrible terrible news for the coffee shops of the world that offer free wifi.

Because if someone can break in, either the company broken into is completely incompetent at their own security, or the attacker is good enough to have the foresight required to not to launch an attack from their own network.

It's not that most of these guys are necessarily bad people, but hackers (in the DEFCON sense) do tend to follow alpha male mentality. Now mix that up with copious amounts of alcohol, the poor social adjustment that many geeks have, and the "anything goes" attitude of Sin City, and yeah you'll have problems.

My experience was that most attendee's poor social adjustment manifested as incredibly timid behavior. You know, just like any nerd-out-of-water ever.

The guy I went to Vegas with made it his mission (and I eventually joined him to a small extent) to spend the weekend pulling people out of their shells.

I used to think this was just an insult to apple buyers. Then the iPhone 4s came out. I'll never forget the first words that came out of my apple buying friend's mouth after seeing the design. "How will anyone be able to tell I have the new one?"

Correct. High level businesspeople don't not care about social relations, statistically they're actually more likely than the general population to be psychopaths, and even when they're not diagnostically so, they make use of the same social toolbox as a psychopath.

Fix the families. Restore family values. Education and all other aspects of life will follow.

I agree that parents are the problem, they need to take a more active role in their children's education, but what are family values? And how are they going to fix the educational life of any child?

I'm not being sarcastic, I actually want to know what "restoring family value" means, because as far as I've been able to tell its a dog whistle term for other things, most of which don't have anything to do with parenting and the few that do are about sheltering children from sex. None of which does dogshit towards making kids care about their own education.

This is the core issue of network neutrality! A network provider should be a neutral network provider, it should not prioritise one vendor's service over another vendor's equivalent service

Yup, this really is the core of the issue. Now, its easy to understand why this exception they've given themselves seems to make sense, the problem is what it implies. A popular 'worst case' is that service providers can't just buy bandwidth and sling to all consumers limited only by the bandwidth they buy and the network path to the consumer. Now, with comcast pulling this, it will eventually be rightly called out as anti-compeptive, they will go to whatever authority calls them out hat-in-hand and say they just can't afford to pull all that data from an outside network, but offer to allow content providers unlimited access to their customers if the other provider does the legwork to get the traffic on comcast's "internal" network, now to "remain competitive" the Netflixs of the world have to start eating more and more costs as they rework their locations and their choice of upstream provider to conform with every consumer ISP whos customers they want to serve to get around artificial roadblocks erected by the ISP.

at least there is a bit I admire from them and it's their independence. They are only pursuing the IPO because they are forced to, but Zuckerberg has attempted to keep things indie (huge indie but still indie) all this time.

Facebook stopped being indie years and years ago (issuing shares, taking VC cash). Since then its all been carefully managed image and branding. He was never forced to IPO, its just his chickens coming home to roost.

The vast majority of people searching for santorum are searching for info about the candidate, not obscene material. If Google wants to provide useful search results, they will change the policy.

They don't need to change the policy. If its not what they're looking for, spreading santorum will start naturally falling in the results. The fact that its not falling is proof that people are searching for 'santorum' to get some laughs from Savage's page.